


There's No Justice (There's Just Us)

by chicafrom3



Category: Andromeda, The Sandman
Genre: Character Study, Crossover, Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-24
Updated: 2011-03-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:05:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicafrom3/pseuds/chicafrom3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Harper beat the odds, and one time the odds were with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's No Justice (There's Just Us)

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by the awesome niki blue.

The first time:

He is six years old (or seven, maybe), and she is the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. Even more beautiful than his ma.

He's spent his whole life, all seven (six?) years, in Dunwich, no experience with anything else, but his ma and Uncle Aidan like to tell stories about Boston proper, and he draws on those stories now to decide that this woman must be a spacer. Certainly no one can spend any amount of time under Earth's sun and remain that pale; and she is too well-fed, too healthy, too _happy_ to be nativeborn.

She sees him and smiles, waves a little.

Beautiful woman or not, he is a Dunwich kid and standards have to be kept, so he yells at her in Cant to go away. Don't let strangers into the village, Dad always says.

He's surprised when the woman responds in the same language. "This is your village?"

"Yeah," he says suspiciously. Spacers aren't supposed to come this far from the city limits. Hell, spacers aren't supposed to go all that far into the city itself. And spacers definitely aren't supposed to speak Cant.

She smiles at him some more. She has a really nice smile. He wonders if all spacers smile like that. "What are you doing this far out, Seamus?"

That pulls him up short. "How do you know my name?"

"It's a long story," she says, and he means to ask her to explain, really, but just then he starts hearing the shrill whistles that mean someone's blowing the alarm. Something bad is happening. The woman says, "I think you should go find your parents now, Seamus."

"I have to find my cousins first."

Her smile doesn't go away, but something goes sad behind her eyes. She says, "No. You have to go find your parents. I'll find your cousins."

"But who are you?"

"Don't worry," she says, "You'll see me again," which doesn't answer his question, but now the whistles are being joined by shouting, and that means things are really bad and his parents will be mad if he doesn't go home, now.

He picks up his stick and runs back to the village. He doesn't look back to see what the woman does.

(And then, look, there's this whole Magog thing, and then Siobhan and Declan are dead and weird spacer women aren't really his problem anymore. Anyway, she probably got eaten by the Magog for wandering Massachusetts like a stupid spacer.)

 

The second time:

He is fourteen. Or thirteen. Or fifteen, maybe. It gets blurry around the edges.

His parents have been dead for a year.

He's pretty sure it's been a year.

Anyway, it's him and Brendan and Isaac against the world, and that's just fine with him because fuck the world. Especially the ubers.

When he sees the woman he thinks he's finally gone crazy.

He hasn't thought about her in a long time. When he thinks about that day, he thinks about Declan and Siobhan and the stench of Magog and terror, not about crazy spacers wandering around getting themselves killed.

Looks like she didn't get killed.

She doesn't look a day older than she did when he was seven (or six, maybe), but now he's old enough to appreciate exactly how beautiful she really is. He wonders, briefly, if she's using tech or surgery to stay looking that young while the rest of the universe ages around her.

Then she smiles at him, and all thoughts of tech fly out of his head.

"You shouldn't be down here," he says when he can remember how to use his tongue. "It's a restricted area."

"You shouldn't be down here, either," she points out.

He scowls.

"I'm not going to tell anyone," she says, lightly, burying her hands in the pockets of her black jeans. "Anyway, I have better things to do. It's going to be a busy night."

"Lady," he says, "Every night in Boston is a busy night."

She laughs and looks sad at the same time. "Yes. It is."

He scowls some more, and turns to walk away. He's gotta be at his post on time for the raid tonight. He can't let Brendan and Isaac down.

"Seamus," she calls after him.

He doesn't stop, though it still bothers him how she knows his name when he's sure nobody ever told her.

"Don't go by the south gate, all right?"

He turns to ask what she means by that -- anyway, the south gate is Isaac's position -- but she's already gone.

(It's a shitty night all around. He doesn't know what went wrong, but when he and Brendan meet up afterwards, Brendan's face is wet with tears and they don't talk about it. They never even find Isaac's body.)

 

The third time:

He's twenty-one. Ish. Probably. That's what he's telling Beka he is, anyway, and he should probably stick to one age. So he's twenty-one.

Ish.

They've docked at a drift to restock on supplies, and then they're headed halfway across the damn galaxy to pick up a shipment. By the routes they're taking, it'll be at least two weeks before any of them step foot off the Maru. He's looking forward to it and dreading it in equal measure. Long hauls are a perfect setup for cabin fever and wanting to kill his crewmates. On the other hand, he never gets sick of space and reminding himself that he really made it out.

He's hauling a case of Sparky Cola up to the dock when he sees her.

Not a day older, dammit. Dressed like any other tourist on the drift. He shouldn't have even noticed her, but the ankh dangling from her neck catches his eye and his memory, and then he sees the rest of her, and dammit...

He puts the soda down and goes to talk to her.

"Hi, Harper," she says when he gets close.

He doesn't ask how she knows that he's not going by Seamus anymore.

"Space travel is so interesting, don't you think?" she muses. "A few organics sealing themselves up into a tin box to go explore the stars. It's ridiculous. And amazing. And all sorts of things. I love it."

"Who are you?" he asks.

She gives him a sunny smile. "You'll remember," she says. "Someday."

Not the right question, then. "What are you?"

"An echo," she says. "Or a suggestion. Or something. What are you?"

"Human."

"A fantastic answer," she says.

He suspects she's making fun of him, but she looks perfectly, unironically happy. "What are you doing here?" he asks.

"Lots of things." She shrugs. "You know, after all this time, I can never quite convince myself that it's really _sane_ to seal an organic being inside a few sheets of titanium and throw them out into a vacuum."

He grimaces. When you phrase space travel like _that_...

He looks at the Maru, trying to shake off the image she's put in his mind. When he looks back, she's gone.

(He tells himself it's just superstition, the kind of stuff Beka laughs at him about and calls him a mudfoot for. But still he checks every damn airlock, seal, and join of the Maru before they leave the drift. He doesn't check the EVA suits -- doesn't occur to him -- and a week later, when they're ejecting Vexpag's body into a nearby sun, he tastes bile in the back of his throat.)

 

The fourth time:

He is twenty-four, probably, and she isn't really there. Can't really be there.

He's been imagining things all day, anyway. Since they got back to their proper time. Since they put Witchhead behind them. He's been imagining the smell of smoke, and the sound of screams, and echoes inside his head, and now he's imagining her, sitting beside him, dressed all in black and silent.

He works, trying to forget what happened (what he did). If he can fix the Andromeda, that's all that matters.

I am become Death, Dylan had said, destroyer of worlds. But that isn't true, is it? It isn't Dylan who became Death, it's him.

"No," she says (he imagines she says), "You haven't. But you did destroy a lot of worlds today three hundred years ago."

He works until she's gone again.

(There are records of the people who died at Witchhead. Real people, people with families and lives and loved ones. He doesn't look up the records. He doesn't want to know.)

 

The fifth time:

He is twenty-five and he is going crazy.

He asks Trance about the hallucinations, and she says it's the stress and maybe he should take some time off. But he can't take time off; Rommie needs her engineer, and anyway, he doesn't have that much time left.

He asks Rommie for her opinion, and she starts talking about how organics are susceptible to delusions, so he doesn't ask her again.

Beka is sad enough around him, so he doesn't ask her at all.

He scans his stomach regularly to keep tabs on the larvae, and he names them, starts inventing personalities for the little parasites. He avoid Rev. He works his ass off. He doesn't sleep. He drinks too much.

He sees her, the beautiful woman in black, everywhere.

In the machine shops, on the Command Deck, in the conduits, in his quarters, on the Maru, in the corridors. Everywhere. When he sees her, she just looks at him. She doesn't smile that much, now. She looks sad a lot. She doesn't speak to him and he doesn't speak to her.

He's in love with her, a little, and he hates her, a little, and he is terrified; he's living with a time bomb in his guts, he doesn't need to be hallucinating a strange woman everywhere.

He pretends he can't see her, but she's still there, in the corner of his eye.

(And then there's the whole thing with Satrina and Hohne and the tesseract machine and Trance, and after that he doesn't see her anymore. Maybe it was just stress, he tells himself. He doesn't believe that.)

 

The one time:

He is...he forgets how old. Older than his parents were when he was born. Older than his parents were when they died. Older than he ever thought he'd get.

He's seen the universe change.

He hasn't retired, though he's been offered the opportunity. He's not old enough -- chronologically -- for a usual Commonwealth discharge, but he's not a usual Commonwealth officer. And as a former Earth kid with a medical history that defies explanation, he knows every medical officer who's been stuck with him has worried themselves sick over his vitals. But he won't retire. He wouldn't know what to do with himself if he wasn't working.

Anyway, Beka needs someone around to keep her from getting too complacent in the military.

He is watching his crew run around like someone cut all their heads off, not getting anything done, all freaking out. Damn kids. It wasn't even a _big_ explosion, and the important thing is getting the ship working, not losing your mind over protocol or whatever it is they're fussing about.

He takes a deep breath and prepares to yell at them until they listen, but a hand on his shoulder makes him cut himself off. When he turns...

...there she is.

It's been so long since he's seen her last, and still her face is the same.

She smiles at him brightly and says in Cant, "Hi, Seamus."

He hasn't heard anyone speak Cant in so long...

"I think it's time we had a real talk. Don't you?"

"Who are you?" he asks.

"You'll remember," she says, which isn't an answer.

"I don't have time to talk. I gotta fix Rommie, these kids can't -- "

"No," she says. "You don't."

He frowns and looks back at his crew. Herons and A'Tuin have pulled something out of the conduit. What did they f --

Oh.

 _Oh_.

"Oh," he says, when he finds his voice at last.

"You can look closer," she says. "If you like. I wouldn't recommend it, though."

"I remember who you are now," he says, and wonders how he could ever have forgotten.

"Everyone forgets," she says. "Eventually, everyone remembers, too."

He nods.

She smiles at him some more, and holds out her hand. "Are you ready to go?"

"Is Beka gonna be all right? And Rommie?"

"Eventually."

"And -- "

"Seamus," she says, gently. "It's not your story anymore."

He thinks that over. And then swallows, and nods, and gets his courage up.

(He takes her hand.)


End file.
